Default VT bindings¶

This audit tracks the default VT translation groups assembled by VTInitTranslations() in upstream xterm patch 411. Revenant should not grow a separate, accidental keyboard-and-mouse vocabulary: an xterm default is either implemented, provided by an equivalent input path, or recorded here as a gap.

The source of truth is src/charproc.c in the tracked xterm repository. The table covers the active patch-411 defaults and the bindings guarded by build options in that function; it does not include user overrides from X resources.

xterm group	Default gesture or event	Revenant status	Notes
select	Shift+Select	Missing	Keyboard-driven selection needs select-cursor-start and select-cursor-end plus explicit cursor/selection state.
select	Shift+Insert	Done	Uses insert-selection(SELECT, CUT_BUFFER0) and the bracketed-paste encoder; SELECT follows selectToClipboard, and named arguments are tried in order.
fullscreen	Alt+Return	Missing	Needs a coherent fullscreen resource/menu/EWMH slice; the client message is small, but policy and useful window-manager testing are not.
scroll-lock	Scroll Lock release	Missing	Output anchoring, focus/LED policy, and widget state make this more than a binding alias.
shift-fonts	Shift/Ctrl+keypad plus and Shift+keypad minus	Done	Uses xterm's historical larger/smaller direction, including Shift+Ctrl+keypad plus.
paging	Shift+Page Up/Down	Done	Scrolls one half-page locally and is not also sent to the PTY.
keypress	Ordinary and Meta keypresses	Equivalent path	XIM lookup and libghostty key encoding run in the raw key event handler rather than insert-seven-bit/insert-eight-bit actions.
popup-menu	Exact Ctrl+buttons 1, 2, and 3, including Lock/NumLock variants	Done	Opens mainMenu, vtMenu, and fontMenu.
reset	Meta+button 2	Missing	Add with clear-saved-lines; libghostty's public full reset clears retained history. This is independent of the optional clear-to-prompt action.
select	Buttons 1, 2, and 3, motion, and release	Done	Cell/word/line selection, Button-3 extension, Button-2 paste, autoscroll, and application mouse routing share these bindings.
block-select	Meta+button 1	Done	Starts rectangular selection.
wheel-mouse	Wheel, plus Ctrl half-page variants	Done	The default wheel distance is five lines, matching xterm; application tracking and Shift override remain effective.
pointer	Generic button and motion events	Done	Routes press, release, drag, hover, modifiers, and wheel events to an application when it enables mouse tracking.
default	Otherwise unmatched button release	Done	The generic release action is harmless when no selection or application report owns it.

Regression rule¶

When a supported local key binding is added, the separate raw key handler must also classify that gesture as translation-owned. Otherwise both paths run and the terminal receives an unwanted escape sequence after performing the local action. Shift+Insert originally exposed this failure by sending modified Insert (CSI 2 ; 2 ~) instead of pasting.

Xt can also dispatch the same physical key event through more than one translation route. Local key actions share an event-identity guard so paste, paging, and font changes run once per X event without suppressing genuine auto-repeat. The release of an owned key is suppressed by keycode, so letting go of a modifier before the key does not leak an orphan release to an application that reports key releases.

Shift+Button 1 on an explicit or detected hyperlink is an intentional Revenant extension, not one of patch 411's default bindings. Shift-hover underlines the target; pressing and releasing on the same target launches only HTTP or HTTPS links. On a cell without an explicit OSC 8 target or detected URL, the same gesture falls through to ordinary selection. The extension and its scheme policy are documented in Hyperlinks and the xterm differences ledger.

Ctrl+Shift+Up and Ctrl+Shift+Down are a second intentional extension: they run previous-prompt() and next-prompt(), the same keys Ghostty binds for prompt jumps, and are translation-owned so the modified arrows are not also sent to the application. Ctrl+Shift+G runs pipe-command-output() on the same terms, and Ctrl+Shift+F runs start-search(), whose search bar then owns every key until it closes. Shift+Up and Shift+Down alone still reach the application. Ownership is decided per event after Xt has run the translations, so an override that binds the gesture to xterm's insert-seven-bit() (accepted as a no-op that leaves the key to the input path) restores xterm's delivery; the xterm differences ledger shows the resource.

Changes to the upstream baseline require re-reading VTInitTranslations() and updating this table. Missing bindings are compatibility work, not intentional drift.

See Copy and paste on X11 for the distinction between xterm's SELECT token, the X11 PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD selections, and its legacy CUT_BUFFER0 fallback.